On Letting Go and Holding On
by Wildly Obsessed
Summary: So close to the brink... Reid's desperate suicide attempt. All the Lonely People. The mind wonders at how such loneliness can be reached while the heart feels guilt at not recognizing it. Can tragedy ever be overcome?
1. Remorse

**Of Letting Go & Holding On**

**Disclaimer: **Berlanti's and WB's. Not mine.

Do you know what it's like to just give up? To try and work and believe and pray for so long and so hard that it's gotten to the point where you just know that you can't any more? Have you ever just leaned back, took a look around, and realized, truly saw for the first time, that there was no conceivable way out. No way around your problems, no possible high ground. Have you ever given it your all again and again until all you had left was emptiness?

Because I haven't. I've obviously made mistakes (more than you'd care to know about, probably). I've had loads of occasions where I honestly thought that nothing, ever, could be okay again. I've been through the 'world hates me and someone out there is truly trying to make my life as tragically painful as possible' phase. I've hated myself and hated every one around me. But I've never let go, not like that. Even when my legs seem to have taken me to a path with a serious dead end, I've never just decided to make the path simply go away. Sure, I have sat down on said path and refused to move. Sure, I've walked around the path only to fall upon it again and again instead of finding an actual solution. But I never, not once, decided that it wasn't worth sticking around for.

That's what really eats me up inside, you know? I can't understand it. Literally, I'm at a loss for words, a loss for thoughts. There's a very large part of me that's fairly pissed at who I am and what I've done right now. I didn't see it. I didn't really try to see it. Absorbed in myself, I accepted the fake smiles on face value, never really delving into detail.

How could he have felt so completely and utterly alone that he did that to himself? He's got two roommates, two clueless roommates, and he never confessed to either of us just how badly he felt. He said he was consumed with overwhelming loneliness. But he wasn't alone. For him to believe that he was must mean that I truly did mess up. Maybe he isn't my responsibility in the respect that I'm not related to him, heck I still don't know him very well, but damn it I live with the guy. I'm his friend. Friends are supposed to be there for each other, they're supposed to tell each other when they're so hopeless inside that they don't see a way out.

You want to know what's worse? He did come to me, once. He laid down his stress, and I told him to consult a counsellor instead of trying to dole out advice myself. Seemed reasonable at the time. Then, of course, his counsellor told him he might be better off just giving up. Those words weren't exactly comforting, and he didn't go to anyone else for help.

Of course, I had no idea that my counsellor advice would lead to the giving up mindset, which led to the cheating, which led to the expulsion. Which led to his feelings of being alone and useless…

When I found him lying there with the empty pill container, I almost stopped breathing, almost forgot how to. How could I have no idea? What the hell is wrong with me?

I didn't find out about his expulsion until after he was already lying unconscious in the hospital bed. Even when I spoke to him there, he apologized to me for the discomfort of having to find him in the washroom. I didn't, I couldn't, apologize. I didn't even tell him that he wasn't alone…no reassurance, just numbness.

It's just so hard. I don't understand. I really, truly can't.

He was there, so still, the water from the shower still spraying loudly overhead.

What if I wasn't in a rush and hadn't knocked on the door?

What if I hadn't bothered to check if things were okay, assumed he was just taking a very long shower?

What if I hadn't found him?

Life is so fragile. People rip it away from themselves, willingly sacrificing it. It's the only thing that we have, that's ours, when nothing else is. And his was nearly extinguished by himself. And I almost let it happen.

God, this is physically exhausting. I'm trying to get it, trying to deal with it. But I began to think about what could have happened to him. I then wandered to the real fact that any one in my life could just…leave it. I have no idea what goes on in anyone's mind. Every laugh, every smile, it could so easily be forced and I wouldn't see it. I wouldn't know it. Someone I love could be on the brink of despair, and I'd be blind to it. I can barely deal with Reid. How would I be able to live with myself if I let something happen, if something did happen, to those that I care about?

There's a moment in every person's mind and heart when you just want it to stop. The pain, the suffering, the decisions, the mistakes, the repercussions. It never seems to go away. But I've never gone that one step further in actually going through with it. Something always, always pulls me back. Whether it's just one person saying one thing, whatever. I get pulled back to the safe emotions. Someone didn't pull him back.

You can't make the pain go away. It's part of living. You can't make the living go away, either. It's selfish, it's wrong…

Yet sometimes, only sometimes, I wonder how it would feel. I think about the release, the freedom. No more worrying, no more tears. No more days where you feel like someone kicked you in the gut and left you bleeding.

But something always pulls me back.

* * *

A/N: May add Reid's POV. Possibly. 


	2. Apathetic way to be

Thanks, my lone reviewer. )

* * *

There's something about me that has people making assumptions, right away. Maybe it's my bright smile, or light attitude. I have a fair few quirks. Bright thought I was gay the first time he met me, though why he assumed that I'm not exactly sure. I've got an attitude that normally encourages people onwards, a nature that let's people know that they don't have to worry about me. In a life full of worries, I'm usually not getting much attention. Not because they don't care, but because I don't seem to need it. I was always the smart one, the happy one. I made friends easily, got girls simply enough, swam through school with a flourish. I was everything normal. Perfect Reid.

The thing is… I need the help. I need people to pay attention, to care. To ask if I'm all right and to read into me when I lie and say I'm fine. They say a good friend can look you straight in the face when you're smiling and laughing and still know if something's wrong. They can just tell. I wish I had someone like that. Someone who I could go to when it got really bad, someone who I trusted enough to help me. But I just didn't have that person. I couldn't let people see that I wasn't perfect Reid. I had stress, too. But people just saw what I wanted them to see. I wish that I wasn't so good at pretending. Maybe then I wouldn't have taken my hopeless thoughts as far as they went.

It isn't that I think my life is crap. It isn't, at all. There's a lot going for me, I know this. But it's not enough. How can I live with myself after letting down the one person I wanted to help above all else? He was the inspiration for my career choice and every hour I studied, every lecture I attended, was for him. But it's all in vain. Floundering madly, I was smart in a room full of average people but below average in a room filled with the best and brightest of Everwood. No matter how hard I pushed myself and how exhausting I became, nothing worked. I always thought that no matter how hard a situation was, I could get through it with enough force of will. Being proved wrong stunned me.

That's not even that bad. It's the fact that I allowed myself to add insult to injury that really bugs me. I couldn't make it, and then I made a conscious choice. I explained to myself why I did what I did, it was all perfectly logical and moral in my mind. In order to be able to morally help the world, to make a good difference, I had to do something that is said to be wrong. The wrong deed was necessary for the greater good…the ends will justify the means. Except that's just not true. I hadn't been able to study and I couldn't risk the chance of failing another test…

What really pains me is that my main thought when they called me in and confronted me about it was how sorry I was. Sorry that I had been stupid and hadn't deliberately messed up a few questions to throw off suspicions. Not regret in cheating, at least not at that moment. My natural charisma failed me. My flawless poker face…useless?

An hour later, when I walked away from my last class of the day and realized it would be my last class I would ever take in the college, the sinking feeling in my stomach grew.

Still, it took a while longer for me to grasp the enormity of what happened. Expelled. How could I have let that happen to myself?

I struggled to maintain that things were fine. How could I face anyone anymore? How could I tell anyone that I had failed completely? That I crossed the line and resorted to something I had never once had to resort to before? I was ashamed and scared. I naturally resorted to the thing that I had spent my entire life doing when an emotionally blowing issue hit me. Denial. I hid behind my perfect mask and smiled as largely as I normally did. Went to the gym, joked with the guys.

And then the act faltered. I was expelled. My life as I knew it was changed forever. The life I wanted so desperately was lost to me for good. My goals, my hopes, my aspirations…gone.

Through the smiles and through the mindless shallow conversations with my friends who didn't know anything, something in me was slowly dying. My heart, the vibrant source of my seemingly undying pep, became detached to me the moment I was told that medical school wasn't for me and it had been squeezed, burned, and blackened each time in turn when I cheated and when they told me I was kicked out.

I managed to hold it together for a few weeks. Then my body realized it couldn't survive without the heart.

One moment, I was in the shower as per my morning routine, and the next I was staring in the mirror, about to gel my hair when I really looked at myself. My eyes were unreadable even to myself. I had finally achieved total control of what emotions I allowed to leak through. This control took away my humanity, to be human means to feel. And then I had a mini panic attack. I had lost my education, I had lost my life ambition, my respect, my morals, and now I had even lost the right to ask for help.

My sleeping pills were something I had acquired before I cheated on the test. I couldn't sleep due to my constant anxiety, not that I had much time to sleep around my studying any ways. They were innocent, and I hadn't ever considered abusing their strength. But something that day made me see and understand what they represented. Those little caplets represented freedom. I could be released from this self hatred, freed from the mistakes I had made, freed from the person I have let myself turn into.

It's probable that on some level, I knew it wasn't right, that it wasn't the perfect action to take. But I wasn't thinking. I was sick of thinking. Every wearying feeling of frustration and of complete isolation from every soul around me clutched at my throat and attempted to strangle me. I pried the trapping fingers off me, just wanting to breathe again.

It wasn't until I had already swallowed a crap load of pills before my brain started working again. I interestedly watched as if I was an outsider looking in… the thud of my head connecting with the cold tile floor resounded so far away, and time seemed to stop. I dimly wondered for a moment if it'd be Bright or Ephram who found me. Then Amy's face swam into my mind, and then the face of everyone I cared about or knew. With a sickening finality, it occurred to me that I'd never be seeing them again. Medical school gone, my gift to my brother ruined… Was this just a huge mistake to top off a lifetime of mistakes, or was it my saving grace?

Light faded to black and, as weird as it sounds, my last conscious thought was…nothing. I wasn't sad, I wasn't happy, relieved, regretful, guilty, content. All I felt was nothing. Blankness. Even as the blankness enveloped me, I thought that this wasn't right. These would be my last thoughts… Shouldn't I be having some kind of groundbreaking epiphany? Some revelation that would change my perspective of life? How about some freaking flashes of my life? I was dying for Christ's sake. But I saw that my death, like my life, would be a quiet and mundane one. Committing suicide was made dispassionate by me.

Would the world miss me?

Would the world even notice?

I had wanted to change the world. Make it just a little bit better for being in it. But I was nothing.

A person to be forgotten. I didn't have close friends. I probably had a bunch of people who thought they were a close friend, and I did have a lo of them considering my genial nature, but none of them really knew. Sure, some of them cared. But none of them cared about me for who I really was, because there was no real me. After pretending for so long, I didn't think there was anything in me behind the front I provided. The content behind my mask had eroded and crumbled from suppression and now I didn't even know what I had wanted to suppress.

My name is Reid, and I had so many hopes. Hopes, but not accomplishments. When it comes down to it, will anyone really miss me? Will my death affect the life of any person? Did my presence influence the people in my life? Or will my memory fade with time, unnoticed?

It's the end of my story, my part in the world is finished. There isn't any more to think about, or do.

I just wish someone would need me back. Not want me back, not wish I was back, but truly needed me there to survive.

But wishes don't come true, do they?


End file.
